Phew!Follow

I know I'm relieved.

Sh*t, by then the kids will be paying our mortgage.

Edited, Jun 19th 2012 5:22pm by Atomicflea

I opted for the 100 year version. i figured by the time I'm that old, advances in medical science will make us basically immortal.

And that brings up an even better topic for discussion. If medical science advances to the point where people are basically immune to diseases and old age, how horrible of a crime would murder be?

I could stand to live a couple hundred years, assuming my body ends up in a good enough shape to enjoy it.

Read an article recently that suggested we're nearly at the point where medical advances will come faster than we age effectively making us nearly immortal from natural cause deaths. Of course, science doesn't really work this way but it was a well written article and made some good points.

I'd be happy to live forever. I don't care how rough it gets. Life > death.

Quality of life to me is more important than immortality.

I mean yeah, I want to live forever too, but only if I get to keep my mental faculties - if I'm uploaded to the Matrix because my body is too feeble to move, that's cool too.

I could be a bored zombie and I think I'd still keep breathing if I could. Anything is better than nothing. Would that change when I'm 943 years old? Nobody knows, but I'd like to think not. Imagine the goals you could achieve knowing you have that much time to work on them.

Of course, the wars would be horrendous. Billions of people having babies that never die...

If we're effectively curing old age though I don't think degradation would be as much of an issue. I'm only 30 and I'm already feeling it but I'm feeling it because my body isn't healing the symptoms of old age.

Haven't seen the article (linky? ) but I'm guessing there's a lot of optimism there.

While we may be making more discoveries than ever before the problems facing the community are growing more and more complex as well. The days of a simple antibiotic curing a disease are largely over. More and more your trying to tackle problems that can't be solved with a silver bullet. Drug targets are increasingly important for other biological factors, so it's not a simple matter of blocking activity anymore. There are reasons why you'll have a new drug released with a long list of precautions, and that's not all just government red tape or anything. We've picked the low-hanging fruit so to speak.

Cancer is a great example of the problem. You're dealing with a problem you can't really just throw a simple drug at, your body is literally killing itself. It a challenge to find something to throw at the problem that doesn't hurt the patient, because well, the patient and the disease are one and the same. It's hard to find away to kill part of you while leaving the rest of you healthy and happy.

Add in other factors that just naturally occur at old age, and you're fighting an uphill battle. The human body is only designed/evolved/whatever to last so long, and it's not just a matter of shrinking telomeres. It's like trying to keep a car running for decades, but you can't really just outright replace all the parts or anything. At some point it just gets to the stage where you're spending a lot of effort dealing with problems arising from parts simply wearing out.

Look on the bright side though, how sucky would the job market be if no one ever retired?

Edited, Jun 20th 2012 8:58am by someproteinguy

To some degree certainly. Your body does regenerate, and has mechanisms to repair itself. These abilities degrade over time, but there's no reason you couldn't find some way to aid that process. The body can't do some things though. We can't grow a new organ. You blow out you hip, you don't grow a new one, etc.



You still have to have a way to identify your target. Not only find it and destroy it, but not follow false signals. Improvements to a delivery vector are important, and we really can't underscore that enough, but you still have to pick your targets somehow. Biomarker discovery is notoriously difficult process. It may be relatively simple to target a bacteria, you still have to make sure you're only targeting that particular strain, which is a bit more complicated. I mean our understanding of the human microbiome is still in it's infancy. Inadvertently killing off beneficial bacteria in your body could damage your immune system, cause you to overeat, lead to vitamin deficiency, and any number of other things.

In addition something like a cancer isn't just identifying the cancerous cells. You'll have a body with cells having all degrees of degradation from a lifetime of exposure to the environment. Catching them when they're sufficiently damaged to cause cancer, but not killing a cell that hasn't crossed that threshold would be difficult. There's much more of a grey area there than just "cancer" and "not cancer." In addition, not all cancers are necessarily dangerous anyway. Do we turn something loose in your body if we don't have to? How do we know when we've reached that point?

Nanotech certainly has a lot of potential as a delivery vector, but again, having the understanding of the human body that's necessary to choose the target is going to be the more difficult step.

Edited, Jun 20th 2012 11:25am by someproteinguy

You grew the first one, so the capability is there, we just don't know how to turn it on and direct it yet. That being said the way it was explained you wouldn't blow the hip in the first place because it would never have degraded. Of course I didn't provide a link so you wouldn't have known that :).



Absolutely 100% agreed. That'd be why we're not there yet. Didn't say it was easy :).

All of the problems are solvable, it's just a matter of when. :)

But we're totally almost there!.

:)

Cost will certainly be a huge issue but I think the bigger issue is going to be space and resources. Once we hit a certain point what do you do with all of the undying people? Unless we have some pretty miraculous advances in space sciences we'll be into some pretty tough moral dilemmas.

What I expect will happen is cost of treatment will be artificially inflated to control the population. Immortal ruling class kind of stuff.

RE: living forever.

That's why you download yourself into an Android body. Duh.